Two years ago, when talking about a U.S. company that makes vanadium mass-storage fuel cells, U.S. President Barack Obama said, “That’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever said out loud” – but confessed he had no idea what vanadium flow batteries do.
What they do is store mass amounts of electricity for long periods of time, which makes them promising for renewable energy, load levelling and backup power storage.
In an exercise of eating its own cooking, Vancouver junior miner American Vanadium (TSX-V:AVC) not only plans to build a vanadium mine in Nevada, it also plans to power the operation with wind and solar power, using vanadium redox flow batteries for storage.
“We want to lead the mass-storage energy industry in North America – sort of putting our money where our mouth is – in running the operation off renewables,” said American Vanadium CEO Bill Radvak, whose background is in biotechnology, not mining, although he has a degree in mining engineering.
Vanadium is a metal used to strengthen steel, but its use as an electrolyte for the vanadium redox flow battery (VRB) market is what the company is focused on.
Initially, 90% of the vanadium mined from American Vanadium’s Gibellini mine in Nevada would be sold for steel making, but depending on how the vanadium battery market develops, the company hopes to shift more toward the electrolyte market.
“We want to be able to sell vanadium as an electrolyte, which gives us a margin,” Radvak said. “Second, we want part of the battery business. We want to become more vertically integrated.”
The Gibellini project is in the permitting stage. Radvak hopes to see it in production in less than three years.
The mine would cost $100 million to put into production, not including the $20 million to $40 million to build the wind and solar microgrid.
Last week, American Vanadium and Gildemeister – a German company that makes the CellCube VRB – signed a memorandum of understanding in which the Vancouver junior miner will supply Gildemeister with vanadium – which accounts for about 40% of the cost of a VRB. American Vanadium, in turn, hopes to become a player in the VRB space.
The companies chose New York to announce their partnership because, as the home to the world’s oldest and largest electrical grid, it will require massive investments over the next few decades.
“New York has made a concerted effort in the last years to become the centre of clean-tech renewable investment, and superstorm Sandy put that into overdrive,” Radvak said. “New York [will] likely be the best customer.”
One of the problems with wind and other renewables is intermittency. Small amounts of wind power flowing onto the grid in fits and starts is manageable, but as it approaches utility scale, large amounts of fluctuating wind power can wreak havoc. Larger scale wind or solar power therefore needs mass energy storage for load levelling.
“Everybody talks about smart grids and microgrids,” Radvak said. “It’s all about energy storage, yet that’s the technology that’s the furthest behind.”
Dallas Kachan, managing partner for clean-tech research and analysis firm Kachan and Co., said vanadium flow batteries show considerable promise.
“In an industry where there’s a certain amount of disappointment about progress to date in grid-level storage, vanadium flow batteries are one of the more promising technologies,” Kachan said.
“These other battery chemistries degrade noticeably over time. The vanadium approach is longer lived. You can also argue the vanadium architecture hasn’t seen as much time in the field as lead-acid has. In theory, the vanadium liquid approach has a much longer lifetime, and that’s why people are so excited about it.” •
How vanadium redox flow batteries work
Developed by the University of South Wales in Australia, 20 VRB systems have been installed by Sumitomo Electric Industries in Japan, the U.S., Europe and Australia for wind and solar power storage and for load levelling at power stations.
One of the unique properties of vanadium flow batteries is that they use a single metal – vanadium – rather than two, so there is no metal degradation, as there is in lead-acid and lithium-ion batteries. This offers longer life cycles.
Two tanks contain a liquid electrolyte of sulphuric acid and vanadium. One tank contains positively charged vanadium ions, the other negatively charged ions. The bigger the tank, the more energy can be stored.
When the battery is being charged, vanadium-4 ions from one tank give up an electron, which travels through a fuel cell over to the tank with vanadium-3 ions. When the battery is discharged, the flow of ions reverses.
What makes it so important for mass power storage is that it has a very low self-discharging rate – meaning electricity can be stored for longer periods of time without losing its charge.
Because there is no metal degradation, the electrolyte solution has a lifespan of about 20 years. It is low maintenance and can be scaled by making the storage tanks bigger according to needs.
